A lifelong study of the molecular details of the lysis-lysogeny switch in the temperate bacteriophage 186 has been a tour-de-force for Professor Barry Egan and his colleagues at Adelaide University. Not only have they described in exquisite detail each of the molecular components in the complex regulatory circuitry that controls these important alternate states of the virus, they have also corrected a major flaw in the existing model for lysis-lysogeny control in the bacteriophage λ paradigm, identified transcription interference as a particular and generic mechanism of regulation, and provided structural and genetic evidence to support the novel role of the 186 repressor. Their work is widely cited in major international journals and they have been invited to top-level meetings to present their results.